This publication presents a selection of ground-breaking contributions, grouped thematically in a new way, which originally appeared in the journal archithese, accompanied by critical essays by contemporary authors.

Located in its specific context – the heterogeneous and turbulent landscape of debates in the years after 1968 – archithese did not only give local protagonists a voice, but it also established a transatlantic dialogue amongst architects, critics and spatial scientists.
Among them were influential figures such as Rem Koolhaas, Aldo Rossi, the architecture collective Superstudio, Alan Colqhoun, Charles Jencks, Denise Scott Brown, Manfredo Tafuri and even Henri Lefèbvre.

The positions gathered here are exemplary for the pluralist approach and thematic openness characteristic for the way in which the art historian Stanislaus von Moos compiled the journal in its founding phase.
The thematic spectrum ranges from historicism, realism concepts in architecture, urbanism, user-oriented approaches to interest in informal and spontaneous building.

Arranged in five thematic chapters, the articles illustrate, in different ways, the examination of the incipient postmodernism and, due to their richness of facets, point far beyond a pure concept of style.